It’s a been a few weeks since the Powerline upgrade.   Predictably something went awry that was worth a few minutes on the keyboard to record. 

After the installation, I set my own network key – in an effort to practice what I preach using a random string provided by my password generator.  Predictably the TPLink software didn’t like that and promptly  threw an error. 

I even tried to be clever by using the network key on ‘far’ nodes first, then on the device I was connected directly too, alas – no dice

After resetting all the devices (having retrieved them from various parts of the house) I decided to just use the built in network key generator.  I duly set this and then promptly lost connectivity with all the Powerline devices, again.  Then I reset them all, and got on with my life.

Time went by with sporadic connectivity, which then mysteriously got worse, what to do?  I wanted to return them, but due to some building work going on here struggled to find the original cartons – that idea was out. 

I then decided to be more like a normal consumer, and just run them out of the box.  Surprise, surprise – they worked.  The only change I made was to configure some meaningful names (in lower case text only – because upper-case is bad, apparently) for each plug. 

That was about three weeks ago and all has been well since – perfect connectivity every time.  Thus, surprising absolutely no -one, running consumer grade kit like a normal consumer is the answer!